This paper tracks an evolving technology of empathy with roots in the work of the philosopher and social worker Jessie Taft and the Pennsylvania school of social work in the 1930s, culminating in the client-centered psychotherapy of psychologist Carl Rogers in the late 1940s and 1950s in North America. This interpersonal method saw the counselor’s role as the reflection, understanding and acceptance of the expressed emotions of the client. By the postwar period, empathy entailed the counselor’s active immersion in the client’s frame of reference while at the same time refusing judgment or the simple affixing of diagnostic labels on the client. Although developed in the context of professional helping relationships in social work and clinical psychology, the molding of the self in the practices of empathy was closely conjoined with the philosophical and political values of social reform, and anti-authoritarian and democratic ideals. The virtues of empathy were popularized in the post war period, and extended to family life, intercultural understanding and even consumer relationships. Following the changing meanings of empathy demonstrates how the intimate emotional ground of psychotherapy and counseling was at the same time a locus for more expansive social concerns in this period.